Michel Azama was commissioned to write the play Anges du Chaos for Prosper Diss (an actor, stage director, and the head of the Théâtre du Sablier in Orange) who created the play in July 2001 during the Festival d’Avignon-Off. It was first published by the Éditions Théâtrales in 2002 and included in the Saintes familles trilogy (Amours fous, Saint amour et Anges du chaos) in which the playwright explores family neuroses, unconfessed desires, the taboo that surrounds incest and the myth of Oedipus. After the staging of the play by Frédéric Valet (from the Hors champs theatre company) on 27 April 2010 at the Théâtre de l’Esplanade / Théâtres en Dracénies (Draguignan, France), the play is published on its own in 2011 by the Éditions Théâtrales.

Anges du Chaos is the only play by Michel Azama that features puppets. The four characters at the centre of the plot (Pascaline, Sarah, Freddy and the Young Man) are played by actors. The play is made of 18 scenes, and the puppets appear 12 times in it: the first time, in chorus, to perform the prologue that is half-sung and half-spoken and, subsequently, in short monologues or dialogues which stage little anecdotes which add a touch of quirky humour.

In his note entitled “Characters”, Michel Azama specifies: “The stage director can move the puppet moments, but those moments are not arbitrary. They have a dialectical relationship with the scene that precedes them. As for interrupting a scene with the puppet moments, it is possible perhaps, but delicate. The puppets can appear unannounced, in an incongruous way, but should not break the thread of a scene, - this is where the difficulty lies.”

While the Father of a rich, bourgeois family is dying at the hospital, his house is being burgled. Pascaline, his help (who has become his wife since he became a widower) laments, but her daughter Sarah is delighted to be relieved of the burden of the memories attached to the objects. A Young Man (the Father’s son) happens to come back that very day after seven years of unexplained absence. Freddy, a young and attractive rogue, arrives the same day to ask his mother Pascaline to give him an explanation for the identity of his father and for the reasons that have led her to abandon him. Pascaline, who behaves like a mother towards the Young Man, rejects Freddy. We learn that she survived the Shoah when she was a child. She pretends to ignore who Freddy’s real father is and she also claims that, after denying her pregnancy, she entrusted her to her sister, who raised him without love in a poor suburb. An alcoholic and a very unstable person, she sees Nazis coming out of the walls, unless that it is Freddy who is manipulating her so that she tells him the truth.

Later, Pascaline, drunk, confesses to Freddy we was born out of a short-lived relationship she had with a Maghrebin jazz musician who died during the Algerian War. She ends up accepting his son as a gift from God. Freddy’s attractiveness and the ambiguity of his behaviour reveal both the Young Man’s homosexual desire and Sarah’s need for love, as she was a prisoner of an unconditional love for her own brother, and therefore rejected any kind of sexual intimacy. The Young Man encourages his sister to find happiness with Freddy while he, knowing that she is happy, will be able to transition into the woman he realized he wants to be. The phone rings and the death of the Father is announced. Pascaline goes off to discover the world, encouraging Freddy and Sarah to build a fulfilling life as a couple in the house.